We didn't sign up for this

This thought has lingered in the air around me for some time, but today i feel compelled to put it into words. Does it matter? I don't know. But there is something profoundly unsettling about how quickly we have changed as a species in such a short span of time.

We belong to a unique generation, the first to embrace social media from its inception. We witnessed its birth, celebrated its promise, and now live with its consequences. What began as a digital renaissance has evolved into something far more complex and, arguably, more dangerous than we ever anticipated. And in this transformation, we've lost something precious: our attention itself. 

In 2017, a group of researchers published a paper titled "Attention Is All You Need," laying the foundation for the transformer architecture that now powers our most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems. The paper demonstrated that machines could achieve remarkable intelligence by learning where to focus their computational attention. Meanwhile, we humans, the creators of these attention-seeking machines, have been systematically destroying our own capacity for the very thing our creations depend on.

The Reality

Last week, I created fresh Instagram and TikTok accounts, bypassing any personalization or following. No follows, no likes, no digital breadcrumbs for the machine to trace. I went straight to the explore sections. What I discovered was far from random. The screen filled with women in bikinis, explicit thumbnails, an endless stream of soft sensual content designed with the precision of a psychological experiment. The algorithm, knowing nothing about me except that I was male, had already decided what would capture my attention.

Then, I asked a female friend to repeat the experiment on her device. Her feed painted a different but equally troubling picture: makeup tutorials, hair routines, outfit inspiration, and shopping hauls—a glossy barrage of beauty standards and consumption-driven content.

These curated experiences aren't accidents—they're the result of algorithmic precision. It's an invisible engineering of desire and fear to keep us hooked, distracted, and fundamentally divided.

In Disguise

In those transformer models, attention mechanisms allow the system to focus on the most relevant parts of input data while ignoring the noise. The machine learns to pay attention to what matters for the task at hand. But we humans have been caught in a reverse process, our attention scattered and harvested by systems designed not to help us focus, but to ensure we never can.

The platforms that promised to save us time have become the biggest time thieves in human history. We scroll in synchronized waves, consuming identical content like factory workers on an assembly line of consciousness. Everyone's watching the same thing at the same moment, yet we've never felt more alone.

I watched a friend recently, thumb moving mechanically across her screen, eyes glazed with the particular emptiness that comes from consuming without digesting. She paused occasionally, not to think about what she'd seen, but to ensure she hadn't missed any notifications. This wasn't entertainment or information consumption. This was something else entirely.

The cruel mathematics of attention capitalism have turned our most precious cognitive resource into a commodity. Every scroll generates data, every pause reveals preference, every double-tap feeds the machine learning algorithms that grow more sophisticated in their understanding of human psychology even as we grow less sophisticated in our understanding of ourselves.

The Disappearing Human

There's a passage in Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" where the narrator describes the peculiar modern condition of being hyper-aware yet paralyzed, conscious yet unable to act meaningfully. Reading it now feels prophetic. We have become underground men and women, acutely aware of our digital imprisonment yet seemingly incapable of escaping it.

The very cognitive architecture that allowed humans to create art, literature, philosophy, and science is being rewired by systems optimized for engagement rather than enlightenment.

I've begun to notice how this affects even intimate conversations. Friends interrupt their own sentences to check phones, not because anything urgent has happened, but because the possibility of digital stimulation has become more compelling than the reality of human connection.

The saddest part isn't that we've become addicted to our devices, though we have. It's that we've forgotten what we're missing. A generation is growing up that has never experienced the peculiar pleasure of being genuinely bored, the creative fertility of unstimulated consciousness, the deep satisfaction of following a single train of thought to its natural conclusion. I think of the writers and thinkers who came before us, people who could hold complex ideas in their minds for hours, days, even years, allowing thoughts to mature and deepen like wine aging in a cellar.

The Way Back

The machines learned that attention is all they need to achieve intelligence. Now we need to remember that attention is all we need to remain human. The choice, remarkably and terrifyingly, is still ours to make.

We need to remember what attention actually is. It's not just focus. It's the fundamental act of consciousness, how we choose to be present in the world. When we give our attention to something, we're participating in its existence, allowing it to change us as we engage with it.

The tragedy isn’t that our attention is stolen. It’s that most of us will never realize it’s gone.